television show was my cue to depart when my mother was absent.) My
mother also appreciated a nice office. But the memory of her father’s
office sometimes pulled her in the opposite direction. She admired her
father, and if a shabby office was good enough for him, it was good
enough for anyone, she thought. Still, she did admire success.
She also feared that my father wouldn’t get enough patients to fill all
those new examining rooms, and that his investment would go south. She
1 0 8
C H A P T E R 6
knew my father. She knew he was weird. His jokes were often corny or
silly. He once showed me a slide presentation that he was preparing for
the local medical society. Inserted between two slides of medical data
was a slide of a naked young woman lying on the beach. “Now how did
that get in there?” Dad laughed with mock surprise. When I asked him
why he had put that slide in, he quipped, “Wakes up the audience.” Nor
was my father a back-slapper. He liked classical music more than sports.
The other doctors blackballed him from their local fraternity. To make
matters worse (and unbeknownst to herself), my mother was also weird.
She had a wicked sense of humor that scared the other doctors’ wives,
putting a limit on how much she could coax them to get their husbands to
refer cases to my father. None of this prevented my father from building a medical practice and making a good living. But filling four examining
rooms with patients, all day, every day, was a stretch given both my
parents’ personalities.
The guests started coming up the walkway, all doctors and their wives.
I was inside the house, lying belly down on the orange-red shag carpet,
vigilantly watching television. I heard a dog bark, then the front door
swing open, followed by a loud “Hello!” but my eyes never left the
screen. A minute later, I overheard one guest telling her husband, “That’s the Dworkin boy.”
“Hello, Ron, how are you?” she asked me.
“Okay,” I replied, without turning my head.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Outside.”
The woman tried to engage me in conversation. “Your mother told me
that you’re going to be a doctor, just like your father. Is that true?”
“Yes,” I replied reflexively, my eyes still glued to the screen.
“Are you going to be an internist like your father?”
“Yes,” I replied, without moving my head.
From the other side of the room, I heard the screen door slide on its
rudder, followed by a torrent of words that made me shudder.
“Quit watching television and go swim with your sister!” my mother
shrilled with her special mixture of affection and anger, although I also detected a sliver of anxiety in her tone. I picked myself up off the carpet and slinked toward the backyard, incapable of offering her any opposition.
A T A L E O F T W O O F F I C E S
1 0 9
I jumped into the pool. My sister and her boyfriend were kissing each
other in the deep end. More guests arrived. Every few minutes I would
reach for the tray of potato chips and onion dip, tasting the tang of onion, salt, and chlorine on my fingers as I listened to the conversation around me.
“You have to raise your rate every year, regardless of whether the
insurance companies pay it,” I overheard an older doctor telling a young-
er one.
“Why?” the younger doctor asked.
“That’s how you keep up your financial profile,” said the older doctor.
“Even if just one insurance company pays your rate, you can tell the other insurance companies, ‘See, this is what I’m getting. If you don’t pay me
my rate, then at least pay me close to it.’ And raising your rate is good for all of us. It keeps the financial profile for the whole region high.”
My mother, another doctor, and his wife were talking about my
father’s new office.
“I hear your husband is building a new office,” the doctor asked my
mother.
“Yes,” my mother replied with a snide tone of voice. “That’s all he
ever talks about. As for me, I could care less.” Instinct caused her to look over toward my father. With a nervous chuckle, she added, “Oops, I think
he overheard me. See? He’s looking over here with his big bug eyes.” She
left to go talk to my father. I listened to more conversation.
“It’s quite an office, I hear,” said the wife.
“Is he breaking through a main wall?” the doctor asked with real
interest.
“I think so,” the wife replied.
“Well, then, it really is a big project. Where did he get the money?”
the doctor wondered.
“I don’t know. At any rate, someone doesn’t spare expense,” the wife
said.
My father was angry because they had run out of ice. He yelled at my
mother as she clawed for cubes in the most remote corners of the freezer.
“Damn you!” he whispered to her, hanging over the top of the freezer
door.
My father had no choice: he had to ask my sister’s boyfriend to go to
the store for more ice. “Sure,” the boyfriend replied dumbly. “I’d do
anything for you guys. I love your daughter.” My father grimaced. The
1 1 0
C H A P T E R 6
boyfriend hopped on his motorcycle and sped away. Ten minutes later, he
revved up his bike’s engine to announce his return, his dog barking and
competing with the bike’s stuttering, backfiring roar for my father’s at-
tention.
An hour later my father noticed the party was also short on dessert.
Again, my father yelled at my mother, but this time he went to the store
himself. When my father returned, the boyfriend’s dog, which had been
sunning itself on a patch of ground, leaped up and fastened its teeth on
my father’s pant leg. My father howled and thrust the dog off with his
free hand. Endeavoring to keep to his feet, he dragged himself toward the front door. He stumbled into the house and poured out a torrent of angry
words at my mother.
Later that evening, after the guests had left, my father yelled at my
mother about my sister’s boyfriend, the dog, and the botched party. The
screaming was horrible. “Close the window, or the neighbors will hear,”
my mother said. My father purposely opened the window even more and
shouted into the world, “I don’t give a goddamn if the neighbors hear!”
My mother returned fire. Finally, my father declared, “That’s it! I’m
leaving!” Driven at full speed toward an act predetermined in the depths
of his consciousness, and for over a decade desired in his heart of hearts, he raced into the bedroom and emptied his drawers in three armfuls,
placing everything onto the bed. Then he opened his side of the closet and snatched a large suitcase he had been storing for just this moment. He
threw his clothes and shoes into the suitcase, closed it, and grabbed four suits on their hangers.
“Where are you going?” my mother asked.
“To find happiness,” my father answered.
From behind, my mother shouted caustically, “Find happiness? Good
luck! It’s the same everywhere, stupid!”
My father stormed out of the house. From the open doorway, my
mother shouted
, “Why are you leaving? Just because your daughter has a
damned boyfriend?”
Leaning out his car door window, the gray Buick Riviera gliding
slowly in reverse down the driveway, my father declared, “I’m leaving
because killing would be too good for you!”
A T A L E O F T W O O F F I C E S
1 1 1
Life changed little for my mother. A week after my father left, she
played tennis with another doctor’s wife while I sat nearby on a bench.
The two women rallied for thirty minutes, then played a set. My mother
was the better player and should have won, but she lost on purpose (she
later told me) to butter up her opponent. Afterward the two women and I
sat down to lunch.
“Everything okay?” my mother’s opponent asked her. “Seemed like
you were struggling out there.”
“It’s a difficult time,” my mother replied, sounding melancholy. Then
she explained how my father had left the house.
“No! Really?” the tennis partner asked.
“Yes, it’s true,” my mother uttered despondently.
“That rat!” the tennis partner declared.
“My life is lousy right now,” my mother declared in a high nasal wail.
“It’s unfair, isn’t it? My children are fatherless, I’m left all alone, but his life is untouched.”
“We’ll see about that!” the tennis partner shouted.
Within three months my father had lost 20 percent of his patient vol-
ume. Each of his referral sources gave him the same explanation: “It’s not me. It’s my wife. She’s mad because you walked out. She won’t let me
send any patients your way—and she works in the office, so she’ll
know!” Even the Catholic sisters at my father’s hospital, who often re-
ceived phone calls from patients asking for the name of a good doctor,
and who would suggest my father, stopped referring to him. “Awful, isn’t
it?” they reacted angrily. “Such a nice family, with three beautiful children, and he just ups and leaves.”
A month later, my father could take no more and returned home. On
his first evening back he crawled out of his car and walked toward the
front door. The dog belonging to my sister’s boyfriend was chained to a
pipe nearby. The dog snarled at him, straining at the leash, eager to bite into his flesh. The animal turned back only when my father opened the
front door. Upon entering the house my father heard my sister’s bedroom
door slam shut, then the pop of his own bedroom door being banged
closed. He went into the kitchen and made dinner for himself. He ate the
meal slowly, blinking moodily. I was engrossed in watching television
ten feet away and never once bothered to say hello.
1 1 2
C H A P T E R 6
In southern California, a hamburger isn’t just a thing. It’s like a flag or the Bible. It has spiritual value. The smell itself forms an inescapable
background to life in the region, quite unlike anything smelled elsewhere, a composite of various odors inextricably mingled with one another.
There is the scent of burned fat and fresh buns. Add to this the aroma of warm asphalt and burned gasoline, and the odor of pool chlorine and
ocean water, which somehow cling to the hamburgers as they’re served.
Given the high density of hamburger shops in southern California, the
pleasing, pungent flavor pervades the entire region.
About a year after my father returned home he took some of the
Catholic sisters and me out for hamburgers. He would often take the
sisters places—for example, to concerts or to the opera—in part to stay on their good side and to keep the referrals coming, but also because he truly liked them and thought it a nice gesture.
I got to know several of the sisters over the years. One tiny sister in
charge of the chapel would waft from room to room like a feather, her
little nose scrunched up in a big smile. Her massive headpiece seemed
unwieldy for her, as her whole upper body swayed in whatever direction
the headpiece leaned, making her look more out of this world than most
sisters. Another sister loved professional football, and she would pass me newspaper clippings of her favorite players. She admired a good tackle or a rush up the middle, but when she described them her words rang with a
tender tinkle. A third sister grew up Baptist in the South, later converting to Catholicism. Her spectacles magnified her round, brown eyes, giving
her an open and honest look, while the crucifix around her neck swayed
in the air whenever she bent down to clasp my forearm with her soft
hand. A fourth sister wore on her habit an image of a crown of thorns
dripping red blood. She often took long walks around the hospital, which
was in a bad neighborhood, and therefore dangerous, but the bloody
crown was probably her best protection, as young hoodlums assumed she
was the den mother of some violent gang, with the crown as its logo, a
hint of the gruesome fate that awaited them if they dared to attack her.
My father both liked and needed the sisters, and he had good reason to
keep them happy. The sisters, in turn, had good reason to keep the doctors happy, since the latter brought patients to the hospital, and they routinely fawned over them. A doctor would enter the hospital through a special
entrance. There, every morning, he would be greeted with homemade
rolls and donuts, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and butter rolled into little
A T A L E O F T W O O F F I C E S
1 1 3
balls. A doctor could take as many buns as he wanted, then sit down on a
plush sofa chair and with his free hand pick through the various news-
papers and magazines lying on the coffee table, all neatly arranged by a
sister before dawn. More food made by the sisters would follow him
around the rest of the day—to the dictation room (the sisters’ way of
coaxing him to keep his charts up to date), to the conference room, and to the special room in the cafeteria reserved for physicians, which also
served free homemade soup.
My father and I walked into the convent to pick up the sisters. For the
first and only time, I saw its insides, including a small eating area. The cleanliness, the absence of clutter, and the small plates for small portions all spoke of the absence of men in the sisters’ lives. The sisters moved
around slowly in their habits. It was hard to imagine any of them having
once run around in a child’s body, young and well.
But some of the sisters did have mischievous spirits. On the way to the
restaurant one sister wore a new soft headpiece, and she was glad about it, complaining that the hard one had kept her from driving all these years. It wasn’t against the law, she said, but the Department of Motor Vehicles
had told her it was dangerous. The hard headpiece had also kept her from
eating a hamburger because the tight band under her jaw cramped her
mouth, keeping it from opening wide enough to get the hamburger in. “I
haven’t had a hamburger since before I was a Catholic,” she half-joked.
She also said the hard headpiece left a permanent crease on her forehead.
We arrived at the restaurant and ordered. Everyone was so happy with
expectation that it seemed almost sinful. I imagined the devil himself
back in the kitchen, roasting the burgers on the grill. I imagined the grill with myself frying on it, blistering hot, flames all around, the oil sco
rch-ing my skin. A shiver went down my back.
I asked the sisters more questions. I asked them if they ever had
birthday parties. They said the sisters held a party for another sister only on her namesake’s feast day. Since a sister’s old identity evaporated once she took her final vows, her actual birthday was ignored. I asked them if they ever went swimming. They said the company that made their habits
also made special bathing suits for them. I told the sister with the soft headpiece that I liked it better than the hard one. The sister laughed, “I do too. Those hard ones make us look like creatures from outer space. They
scare people. I try telling them not to worry, and that we sisters don’t just grab anybody we bump into. There’s got to be some sin involved. But
1 1 4
C H A P T E R 6
that just makes them more afraid. You’d think I was going to shoot them
with a ray gun.”
The half-pound cheeseburgers arrived five minutes later, diapered in
wax paper to dam up all the drippings. One of the sisters stared in astonishment. She could have never fit one into her mouth wearing the old stiff headpiece, she said. She crossed herself hastily so as to separate herself from animals who simply grub for their food in the wild. Another sister
picked up her cheeseburger gingerly, as though it might explode.
In between bites I asked the sisters why some of them wore long
habits and others wore shorter ones, above the ankles. The sisters grew
silent. Something about my question seemed to bother them. One of them
said it was just the fashion, and then she quickly changed the subject.
Years later, I discovered that the shortening of the habits, along with
softening of the headpieces, the two weeks’ vacation that some sisters
wanted, and the right to live outside the convent and the right to serve a visitor a cup of coffee without getting permission from the Mother Superior, were all hotly contested issues among Catholic sisters during this
period. Even Pope John Paul II had weighed in, attempting to reverse the
trend toward disintegration in America’s convent communities by reem-
phasizing the importance of wearing the habit, living in the convent, and practicing the vow of obedience. The sisters were living a centuries-old
Medical Catastrophe Page 16
